Music
The American way with words
Peter Phillips
TMemphis, Tennessee he airport/concert-hall/hotel/airport routine has been going on now for 13 days and promises to last some time longer. I have the impression that the same hotel has been following me round the country, and that it makes its profits from selling eggs over easy at all times of the day and night, of which I have eaten far too many.
The dissatisfaction of knowing that ,I Shall not resist the next grease-fix when- ever it may appear is heightened by the ultimate bloat: having performed the same Programme too often and become anaes- thetised to some of the greatest music ever written. A jaded palate is a terrible thing. I wonder how some of the Columbia artists keep lively in this country, giving the same show perhaps 40 or 50 times on a tour. I find that the more poignant the emotion in a piece of music, the greater my reluctanee to bring it repeatedly to life. Orie shrinks from it, and looks forward to the more neutral passages, which is really not how interpretation should be.
Part of the jadedness is caused by having to talk so much about the mysteries of performance. The Americans wish every- thing to be analysed, that is to say put into words, so that there is a real danger of trivialising an innate reaction to music, which of its nature should remain abstract. I have often admired the patience and ingenuity with which wine-lovers labour to find adjectives for a favourite vintage, and found the results pretty helpful; but music is a degree more abstract even than the taste of liquid and the necessary vocabul- ary is simply not to hand. Can you imagine a 'flinty' piece of music? Yet I could wish for some other resource than 'clear' and 'sonorous'. I experimented briefly with `agile', btit some listeners got the impress- ion that we were involved in ballet (with the accent heavily on the second syllable) and I was obliged to drop it. Perhaps the Americans themselves could help me out. Their rearrangement of our language can be so itnaginative. It took a stroke of
genius from one of our listeners to say that he had had a 'pleasure seizure' and make the first word rhyme with the second.
This knack of language, which is a real fluency even if it so often makes us Brits want to run for the rest-room, is behind the success of many US tours given by Euro- pean artists. The media here are both receptive and influential in a way which local newspapers and radio stations in Europe never are. Because of the lack of a centralised system the local organs, at least in the larger towns, are as respected and as respectable as the best in Europe. The difference is that there are so many of them in the US and everyone, from top to bottoin of society, sooner or later seems to pick up what they are saying. I must now have given 30 interviews to support this current tour, and one result has been the unusual circumstances of an airline atten- dant and a waiter at dinner coming up and announcing that they would have come to the concert if they had not been working.
It is hard to imagine their European counterparts being so curious, or so well versed in what was going on. The secret, though, lies in the way the American presenters do their work: quick to find the element in the music which will appeal, to the most people, and adept at putting that element across. My experience of BBC Radio Three interviews is that the British public by and large have only to hear the tone and phrasing of the first question to conclude that 'this is not for them'. Indeed the great majority, by breeding and long experience, never tuned in in the first place.
One intriguing qtiestion which so far has gone unanswered is the origin (and mean- ing) of the term 'the greenroom'. I gather from circumstantial evidence that this is the place where the artists are meant to change, and at every venue we are invited to go to it. But since this space. has not once been green and often could only loosely be described as a room, we have understand- ably been in some confusion. The pick of these 'greenrooms' has been the confer- ence chamber in the Los Angeles City Hall, a huge area filled with a V-shaped table and enormously important heavy leather chairs, which stand before all the usual desk paraphernalia including mic- rophone and brass name-plaques. I took my ease in the mayor's place. The only green changing-room of which I, have ever seen the inside is at the.Wigmore Hall, and that is a turquoise colour, not green enough to have started an international trend. Perhaps the French are responsible.
I must remember in future that if Tallis's music should ever strike me as less than perfect I should allow myself to suffer a pleizure seizure. But all is not lost: I am still on a high from being told that 'when I'm really into it, I'm really out of it'.
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